Aaron Ross Powell

So much of being online is constructing and performing identity.

A pretty standard take on "Why is everything so bad online?"

Trying something new.

Every day it seems we have some version of The Discourse About Social Media Community Values, Norms, and Tone.

The disappointing alchemy of algorithmic advertising brought me a pitch for a magazine called Field Ethos, co-founded by the lowest of the Trump scions.

The way you typically sell people on decentralized tech—on social media, blogging, and other community websites that are based on, as @masnick.com calls it, "protocols, not platforms"—is by telling them what it prevents.

Imagine, by way of analogy, that you start a coffee shop.

Some time ago, I was in a conversation about whether, if we could do it through technology or other means, we ought to abolish work.

I'm on record saying that what's being built at the AT Protocol, and on the AT Protocol, is a very big deal.

In the opening chapter of his book Ghosts of My Life, the Marxist theorist Mark Fisher argues that capitalism has destroyed creativity.

I've been traveling.

This passage on skillfulness, from Thanissaro Bhikkhu's The Wings to Awakening, provides us, I think, with a helpful way to understand how political decision-making and political action can go wrong.

I'm reading Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, and there's a lot to like about the book.

There's an experience of getting really into the lore.

The day is finally here.

A little while back, I ended my ReImagining Liberty podcast's run at 101 episodes to make way for something new.

We're in another round of garment rending on Bluesky because not enough people are using it, we're told, and the reason is that Bluesky's heavily progressive community is mean to non-progressives or insufficiently-progressives, we're told.

My recent post on what the ancients knew about posting well borrowed an early Buddhist test for speech, from a an ancient dialogue called the Abhayarājakumārasutta, in which we're told that speech worth saying is true, beneficial, and offered at the right…

We're bad at social media because social media encourages us to be that way.

Just finished reading two essays from Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, "Karma" and "The Road to Nirvāṇa Is Paved with Skillful Intentions", and they're both excellent.

I want to tell you about a feeling I don't have, because its absence has turned out to be philosophically useful.

My kids like buying physical media.

Today I have a bittersweet announcement.

Google’s new Lyra 3 Pro music generation AI model is undeniably impressive.

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you might’ve noticed common threads in my writing on liberal virtues, on sympathetic joy, on social conservatism as suffering, on the ethical disaster of Twitter/X, on what happened in Minneapolis, etc.

Philosophy produces knowledge in two fundamentally different ways.

Click here to listen in you favorite podcast app https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reimagining-liberty/id1614436300?

Let’s say you’ve never played a video game before, but you hear about them from a friend or see the characters of a supernatural 80s nostalgia drama series playing one around an old TV in their basement.

You call it “doomerism” in a social media context, but there’s a common thread in strains of the political left in the US right now that basically counsels giving up.

A big difference between the second Trump administration and the first is, I think pretty clearly, Trump's information environment.

What we’re watching in Minneapolis is the forces of a federal government ruled by a fundamentally anti-social ideology running into a wall of operationalized neighborliness.

You might've noticed ReImagining Liberty episodes have been a little slow lately.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth likes to be videotaped working out with the troops.

Keeping with holiday tradition, my friends and I at The UnPopulist published our roundup of staff picks and holiday recommendations.

Click here to listen in your favorite podcast app The ideologies that shape our world can be awfully weird.

The trouble with algorithmic feeds, on social media or YouTube or TikTok or wherever, is that they put a thumb on the scale for bad behavior.

(Originally published September 22, 2025) I was thinking about which person I’ve never met has brought me the most joy, and it’s probably Christopher Guest.

Click here to listen in you favorite podcast app Regimes falter when opposition media is strong.

Today, FIFA, the most corrupt governing body in sports, gave its inaugural FIFA Peace Prize to Donald Trump, the most corrupt governing body in America.

The second Trump administration is playing out rather differently from the first.

The way they teach you to write in high school is to make your prose sound like everyone else.

https://pod.link/1614436300/episode/YTA2MGIxNWUtZGJmZS00YzY1LWE3NjctMWZiM2YwNjNjNTdj It’s still possible Trump succeeds in his project of authoritarian consolidation, but between the dramatic losses the GOP suffered in the elections on November 4th, the i…

Imagine you’ve had success in a field that has historically been dominated by people who look like you.

Far-right political commentator Bethany Mandel took to X to remark about how other moms in her neighborhood don’t like her because she’s shitty to trans kids.

The combination of the GOP’s absolute shellacking in Tuesday’s elections and the conflagration at the Heritage Foundation around their president’s support for groyper Nick Fuentes and the growing realization internally about how many of their junior staff…

Yesterday's elections were obviously big wins for the Democrats, and big losses for the forces of far-right authoritarianism.

This is going to be one of those instances where I probably fail to take my own advice.

I’ve written before about how we ought to view ethics not as a field of knowledge you know, but as a practice you learn to do.

Yesterday, walking with my family down 15th street for Denver’s No Kings protest, I felt like we can win.

(Originally published May 3, 2023) The high drama on Twitter right now is, as always, about status.